Statistical Significance of Outcomes as Presented in Messina's, et al. Article

Statistical Significance of Outcomes as Presented in Messina's, et al. Article

Introduction

The study performed by Messina (2009) consist of two major research questions. Firstly, the research aimed to understand the association between inpatient admissions and patient satisfaction. This relationship was analyzed in the context of acute healthcare delivery based organizations. Secondly, the relationship mentioned above, was analysed in the context of two different kinds of healthcare delivery based organizations. These organizations are classified as either non teaching based or teaching based. Thus forth, the relationship between the mentioned variables in the two environments was scientifically analysed (Messina, 2009).

There are various methods used in the study to analyze the two posited research questions comprehensively. For the first research question regarding relationship between inpatient admissions and patient satisfaction in hospitals, the methodology used, bifurcated the sample into two groups. These groups were classified on the basis of healthcare facility, i.e. non teaching and teaching hospitals. Then the descriptive statistics for non teaching and teaching hospitals were used to test the hypotheses.

The second question in the research by Messina (2009) expored the relationship between inpatient admissions and patient satisfaction. The exploratory study uses correlation matrix analysis. This is because the purpose of this statistical tool is to determine the percentage impact created by one variable over the other.

Discussion on the appropriateness of the use of statistical techniques

In order to understand the context of relationship between the variables of inpatient admissions and patient satisfaction; it is very important to determine the demographics of the acute care hospitals. So, the demographic analysis was fairly an appropriate statistical technique to initiate the research question. In the demographic analysis teaching and non - teaching hospitals were divided into three demographical regions i.e. North, Central and South region. This had helped in determining the nature of relationship between the teaching and non - teaching hospitals in different regions and reached to the conclusions accordingly. There were 43% of the teaching hospitals in the North region while central region had the higher percentage of teaching hospitals i.e. 52%. Lastly, south region had the most amounts of teaching hospitals, signified by 72% of total hospitals in the region.

The analysis was further proceeded to descriptive statistics of the admissions of the patients in non - teaching and teaching hospitals. Furthermore, the satisfaction scores they give about the hospital. The technique is also found to be appropriate as well as significant mean scores and deviations from the mean provide a significant analysis of the nature of relationship between the variables. The mean number of participant admitted in both the teaching and non - teaching hospitals were found to be 19110 but the maximum number of patients admitted in a year reached to 70465 which is significantly different from the mean i.e. there are high variations observed in the patient admissions in the hospitals on every year. There were a total of 68 hospitals that were taken in the ...